Alastair Reynolds has a website at http://members.tripod.com/~voxish/Home.html
. The content on the site is pretty nice (notes on his various
writings, and his comments on hard SF writers past and present),
but his web host, Tripod, forces an annoying popup banner window
while you browse the site.

The book was "sponsored" by Ignacio
Viglizzo and Raja Thiagarajan.

Raja says

Chasm City is set in the same universe as two
other novels: Revelation Space and
Redemption Ark, and six shorter stories: "A Spy
in Europa", "Galactic North", "Great Wall of Mars", "Glacial",
"Diamond Dogs", and "Turquoise Days". You can read "A Spy in
Europa" online
at the Infinity Plus website.

While I enjoyed Revelation Space (his first
novel), I pushed for the group to read Chasm City
instead because (a) I think it's a better novel, (b) I think
it stands alone quite well (Revelation Space
points strongly to a sequel), and (c) it comes first among the
novels, in terms of internal chronology (Chasm
City's Epilogue has a short scene pointing to the start
of Revelation Space).

If you plan to read more stories set in this universe, I
recommend that you read Redemption Ark last--it's
a "sequel" to not only Revelation Space but also
to "Galactic North", "Great Wall of Mars", "Glacial", and
Chasm City. (At least, those were the references
I recognized when I read it; I wouldn't be surprised to find
I'd missed references to the other short stories.)

Reynolds's next novel, Absolution Gap,
"concludes the loose sequence of novels relating directly to
the Inhibitors." (That would place it after Redemption
Ark.) "That doesn't mean that there won't ever be
another novel set in the same universe as these books. Any
further books, however, will be more like Chasm
City, standing on their own and with only background
references to the Inhibitor theme."

Both Chris Stanley and Lisa Bradley
finished the book later and emailed their votes in. Interestingly,
both said that a better book "could have been distilled from
it." However, they disagreed about which part they liked; Lisa
(and several others) thought the first part was more interesting,
while Chris wrote "...I found the whole thing boring except the
last 50 pages or so." and "It's as I always suspected.
*I'm* the weird one." ;-)